cellofaan's stuff

[cellofaan]

Changed the title so it's now more of a collection of stuff rather than having to make a new thread for everything.



While my build is not exactly finished yet, and it hardly contributed to this project, I have used it a tiny little bit for one of the images.



It's is a design for a bookcase I made for one of my courses. I'm afraid all the text in the booklet is Dutch, but I'll give a short summary on the whats and hows.

As I am an architecture student, I designed as if a building, and presented it as an architectural design, using plans, elevations, sections, and detailing.
The design process resembles an architectural design process as well, though the program of requirements of a bookcase is much simpler than a building, leaving time to actually make the drawings that can be used to build it.

The bookcase is inspired by the Unite d' habitation by le corbusier, and the shelves follow a rhythm based on Take Five, by Dave Brubeck, translated into a physical and chromatic form, which can be likened to the facade of the monastery of La Tourette, (also by Le Corbu, but the facade I'm referring to was actually designde by Iannis Xenakis).

All dimensions are based on the fibonacci sequence, as that turned out to be vsually pleasing, and easy to work with.

There's a lot more to it, but those are the key aspects on the design, and the main focus in the booklet as well.


http://issuu.com/cellofaan/docs/take_five


The booklet itself was composed with inDesign. Most images were rendered in Kerkythea (modeled in SketchUp), linework was mostly drawn in AutoCAD or exported from SketchUp to AutoCAD, and both were added together in Illustrator. And some minor photoshopping to enhance the rederings and draw one of the cats.

By the way, the website seems to have an issue with the reds, they are supposed to be the same, but some look more purple.


I was making a 1:5 model of it in an earlier stage, but I decided to change all dimensions, so I didn't finish it. I will make one somewhere this year (a design is not finished without a physical model). I'm planning to print the booklet, make the hardcover, and bind it, coming week, after which I'll post some photos.

[marmor69]

I have to say this is AWESOME!!

I really love the Take Five concept and how the Fibonacci sequence plays into this. Great composition
Would love to see some pictures of a model.

greets,
Markus

[cellofaan]

I have to say this is AWESOME!!

I really love the Take Five concept and how the Fibonacci sequence plays into this. Great composition
Would love to see some pictures of a model.

greets,
Markus

Thanks!

I'm quite pleased with it myself too.

The model will take a couple of months at least before I get round to finishing it.
But here's a photo of an other model I made.

It's an existing hall in one of the faculty buildings, for which I designed new lighting fixtures. Didn't make any nice images though, but the model photos turned out pretty good.
I meant to render the lighting and photoshop it into the photo, but I never found the time to do it.

The model is 1:50, so the actual model was about 60 by 20 by 15 cm. The girl is, of course, photoshopped.

[bernard]

Wow! and re-wow!

Bookcase:

The side openings are quite cool. Playing with the numbers series is cool too.

I recognize the mind of a ingenious man: richness, deepness with lots of parts but still managed to convey simplicity.

I like the idea of the "model" cat sitting on the shelf    Is this common in architectural pictures?

Faculty Hall: 

I am not sure where are the fixtures in your picture (or maybe you were saying they weren't there?). The photoshop girl seems quite lonely in this huge hall. Maybe she is also looking for the fixtures?

[cellofaan]

Thank you too.

Glad you like the cat! It's no architectural thing. Well, maybe in a way. It's common to add a few people, cars, or trees, in order to give a better idea on the scale of a drawing. I like cats, so I add one or two in every set of presentation drawings I make. You could see it as a signature.

The faculty hall, yes, there are no fixtures. The fixtures are a lie!
As I said, but not very clearly, I made this image at the start of the course, intending to photoshop the fixtures later. Which, as can be seen in the picture, I never did 

[cellofaan]

Also pretty cool, I (with a friend) won the annual spaghetti bridge building contest at the faculty of civil engineering.

We built the bridge a week in advance, then it got loaded until breakage. The bridge that held the most, relative to its weight, won. Ours weighed in at 558 grams, and collapsed at 53,3 kg.
Could've been a lot more, but the rig they built to load the bridges was crooked, so the bridge got loaded in a completely different way than we anticipated.

We also won the prize for the most beautiful bridge, though it wasn't the prettiest bridge we've made. Quite unexpectedly.

Third, we won the team building competition, in which we got an assignment to build a 50cm spanning bridge, able to hold 4kg, in 3 hours. Ours was the third lightest, but the two lighter bridges collapsed, so we won.

The civil engineering students weren't pleased with us taking all the prizes.

Total earnings: 1800 euros, and we got a job offer from one of the sponsoring engineering companies. Not too shabby.




Our bridge (it was already breaking, but held on for about another 10 kg) The road deck is supposed to hang like that.


Team building contest bridge. My friend's putting the weight on it.


More pictures of the competition at
http://spaghetti.tudelft.nl/fotos/main.php?cmd=album&var1=Wedstrijd+2010/

[Drewid]

I love these sort of competitions, and congratulations.

[bernard]

WOW!  Impressive!

How's the spaghetti pieces holding together?

[cellofaan]

The spaghetti was glued together. Next year we might do some nitting or weaving without using glue. Won't be strong though.

So yesterday I decided to teach myself some photorealistic rendering. Here's the first result.

Modeled in Rhino 4.0 and rendered with VRay for Rhino.

Modeling cost me about 4 hours because I didn't know how to get the corners to be extra rounded.
Texturing was easy, just two colours with a little reflection.
Rendering took about a minute.

[bernard]

It's been a long time since I did 3D stuff, I do not even know that a tool called Rhino even existed! -- do you like it? Can Vray for rhino do radiosity (and was is it "turned on" in your picture)?

[cellofaan]

Rhinoceros 4.0 is a 3D nurbs package. Next to sketchup it's my favourite modeling software. It's a lot more advanced than sketchup, but still has a relatively simple interface, which looks similar to AutoCAD. As I knew my way around in AutoCAD, stepping into Rhino was a breeze.

Vray is a rendering engine which works as a plugin for several modeling softwares. I'm using it in Rhino, but it's also available for sketchup, maya, 3ds max, and probably others I don't know of.
The interface for Vray is also the same for every platform, so if you can render with it in rhino, you can render with it in sketchup, etc.
It doesn't do radiosity. Instead it uses Global Illumination. I'm not that into things to actually know what the differences are and which is 'better', but according to the great google it's

Fundamentally Global Illumination and Radiosity use different light transport algorithims. Basically meaning that the way vray calculates light is different then a radiosity calculation.

One of the main issues with Radiosity is that there is an actual mesh that is created for the model, and each face contains the illumination data.  This becomes an issue for two reasons. First is the creation of the mesh itself. Its can be quite an intense process as well as adding allot of information to the file equalling huge files.  The second issue which is related to the first, is that illumination is stored or calculated per face.  This means that one face only has a certain range of illumination values. This means that in order to have a very accurate solution (even though it would never be physically accurate) it requires a very dense mesh. This causes more time, more file size, and the great thing is that if you move one object or change one light you get to do it all over again.

GI does all its calculations on the fly. Meaning the you don't need to  do any precalculations (you can, but thats special).

As for Photon mapping, Vray is unique in that it has several different methods for calculating illumination.  Your right dtr, photomapping can be use in combination with radiosity, and uses some of the principles of it.  Most users don't actually use photon mapping to do any light calculations (Primary or secondary bounces I mean)with Vray.  However Vray does use photon mapping to create caustics.  This actually means that you can save your caustics solution much like you would save a radiosity solution. 

One of the main reasons why Vray users don't use photomapping is that Light Cache is a very similar method, but is much more simple to set up. With photonmapping you have to set up the subdivisions on a per light basis.  The calcuation is done by actually tracing rays, based on those subdivisions, from the light to wherever it bounces around in the scene.  Light Cache uses the same principle, but with two important differences.  First off it doesn't use individual light subdivisions, but rather a global subdivisions that is based on the image itself.  Secondly it traces rays from the camera as opposed to from the light.  These two things allow for LC to be what is know as a view specific calculation method. This means that for each rendering only the information for what is in view is calculated. This is quicker and the solution can be saved as well.

I've used Artlantis a while, which does use radiosity. Kerkythea and Mental ray (Maya) use Global Illumination. But this is the first really realistic image I've managed.

[bernard]

oh! -- Now you got me reading on stuff.  It looks like the term "GI" seems to have multiple meaning - I mean your text differ from mine in the sense that "Radiosity" would be considered a type of Global Illumination:

Radiosity, ray tracing, beam tracing, cone tracing, path tracing, Metropolis light transport, ambient occlusion, photon mapping, and image based lighting are examples of algorithms used in global illumination, some of which may be used together to yield results that are fast, but accurate.

One thing I am getting is: In short, radiosity takes a lot of time computing a "diffuse" model for the entire scene, whereas "GI" (or the other algorithms) tries to compute similar stuff but restricting it to what the camera cares about in the current frame.